PC Gone Too Far

Hi Percy, Have you ever seen this documentary?
What Our Fathers Did: A Nazi Legacy (2015) - IMDb "what our father's did"It is a documentary about three men who are placed together to come to terms with the past. 2 of the men are the sons of high ranking Nazi officers and the third man is the son of Jewish victims of the Holocaust.One of the sons in the film suffers from abject avoidance behavior and blame shifting when it comes to laying any responsibility or moral fall out from the deeds of his father, who so happens to be personally responsible for thousands of Jewish deaths.This son is unable to come to grips with what his father did.
He was only about 8 years old when the crimes happened. He himself is not guilty of anything. But throughout the film he is seen to rationalize and apologize and down right refuse to give credence to evidence of his fathers evil deeds.It is one thing to wish to protect and preserve the memory of those we revere. But I believe it is also important to accept that they are evil and perpetuated great evil and thus should be held in contempt for what they did. Even if it is ones own father it is important to lay those biases aside and validate the victims and survivors scorn of those that have done great evil to them.There is no honor among those who act dishonorably imo.Less we forget.

Ringo posits: Tell that to Edward Snowden's lawyers. The USA apparently still thinks it is a crime.

And what is your own view of Snowden?

NoNukes askes: Hero, along with Assange and the others.

dsfsdfdEdited by NoNukes, : Removed pointless argument

too obscure for me...too many ways to read that wrong.sorry.

quote:

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McPherson actually said views of slavery as evil had faded *by* 1830, not after 1830.

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Percy, both of these statements indicate that slavery was considered evil prior to 1830 and not after 1830. What error are you referring to here? Perhaps I made a misstatement in the earlier post, but I don't see that same error in the statements you quoted. What distinction are you making.My point is that the change of opinion documented in the article was in response to the slagging the South was getting from the North over slavery. In neither case should slavery being beneficial be seen as a motivating factor for slavery. Because the institution well predated the change in opinion. What I am further arguing is that we have reason to suspect that this new revelation that slavery was beneficial to Africans was not based on any research or analysis, but was instead prompted by the position that writers on the subject were placed in by the attacks by abolitionists and northerners.Of course my argument is less than a proof. It is what I consider a plausible explanation and one that I think must be considered at least on a par with the idea that southerners managed to deceive themselves. Slavery simply was not beneficial to slaves and we needn't accuse folks who come to that conclusion of not being objective.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

NoNukes writes: I don't think anyone here is making that argument. Certainly not me or Percy or Cat's Eye.You, yourself, in Message 430 said: No one is going to withhold judgement forever that slavery was not beneficial to slaves - in fact many of us even got sidetracked into comparing it to the horrors of genocide. But first, gather the data.It is the analysis part where we need to find the objective picture of how the Confederacy came into being. Very many people died over this. How did this happen? (not so much the "why?", but more of a historian's "how?") Wouldn't it be best to preserve as best we can the relics of this? not to destroy them? If we never get to understand it, how can we smartly see it when it starts happening again, under different clothing? under a blonde toupee?Sure - it is easy for us to say "it's Evil", a slam dunk, no need for further analysis. But it just isn't that simple.

In fourteen-hundred and ninety-two
A colonial ruler he became
And much to his eternal shame
He could not with principle behave
And must murder, torture and enslave....https://www.change.org/...columbus-day-as-a-national-holidayI think that supporters of the removal of the Louisville statue should also be supporting the removal of Columbus Day, and the changing of all names in the Americas that commemorate Columbus (Columbia, D. of Columbia, British Columbia etc.).(I don't support the removal of the statue or the application of modern ideology to any remains of the past).

We're not deciding whether to commemorate anything by putting up a monument. People 120-years ago decided to put up a monument to Southern armies and war dead. We're deciding how to preserve a part of history. It should be done objectively and not according to the emotionalism of people who seem prepared to fight the Civil War all over again.--Percy

You're making the same appeal as NoNukes, Rrhain and Ringo, and I can only give the same response. Is there any broad agreement on what evil is, especially when applied to nearly all the people of an entire nation? Didn't both sides take up arms in defense of principles they felt important? Attempts at an answer quickly bring the realization that evil is highly subjective.People are making strong arguments that slavery as practiced in the South was evil, and while I disagree with the terminology I do largely agree. Owning another person is wrong, mistreating humans is wrong, and so forth.But even adopting the ambiguous terminology, there are few arguments that the rank and file of the Southern armies were evil, and even the arguments that certain individuals were evil are weak. Here again is the description of philosopher Paul Ricoeur's view: "Ricoeur agrees with many other thinkers that evil is not a thing per se, but rather exists in a sort of black hole of thought, an aporia [link to the definition aporia]."The point is that what is evil has no objectivity but is in the eye of the beholder. Many perpetrators of what we think evil (e.g., ISIS, the North Korean government, Osama bin Laden, etc.) think us evil. If you think an exploration of the facts will show they're wrong and that we're good and they're evil then a quick review of our history of intervention and interference should give pause.Speaking of intervention and interference, it can be argued that the main cause of the Civil War was the threat of interference by the North in Southern affairs. Whether slavery was right or wrong, it was an internal affair of each Southern state in which the North had no business. The argument that the wrongness (or evil as you prefer) of slavery justified Northern intervention was rejected by the North (including especially Lincoln) from the beginning of the war to nearly the end. At a political level the North was fighting to preserve the Union and the South to preserve States' Rights.--Percy

This might be something we can agree upon. If when you say that "southerners managed to deceive themselves" you think it okay that I equate that to my own belief that they believed their own rationalizations (as did the North), then fine. But I could never accept that the South was lying and knew it.The NYT had a recent editorial about Trump that describes the effects of being surrounded by people of like mind: Is the Trump Campaign Just a Giant Safe Space for the Right?. Would you say the Trump people know they're wrong but are saying it anyway (whatever "it" is, but too often apparently substitutes mindless epithets ("Hillary sucks!") for analysis). The point is that it isn't in most people's nature to express beliefs they know false, whatever the objective analysis might say about those beliefs. I have pretty much the same response as Xongsmith. No one here is accusing anyone of a lack of objectivity for concluding that slavery was not beneficial to slaves. I think we all agree that slavery wasn't beneficial to slaves. I have no idea why you said this.What's at issue is what Southerners truly knew and believed. I liked Xongsmith's point that we must not hide how mistaken Southerners were, because it serves as an example of how easy it is for any people, including especially ourselves today, to be wrong. We can't act upon blithely contrived accusations of evil while ignoring that this justifies the acts of others who have arrived at different conclusions of what's evil. We understand you agree that analysis is important, but summarizing the analysis under the single word "evil" is ambiguous and subjective.--Percy

As I have said more than once, it doesn't matter what they thought they were fighting for. The slave system that they were fighting to preserve was a genocidal system, whether they understood it or not, whether you understand it or not. Evildoers typically don't think they're doing evil.

I have said repeatedly that once the events of history have been established there is no place for objectivity. Why are you surprised every time I say it? No. I'm in favour of remembering history as it was, remembering evil as evil, not just preserving the evildoers' viewpoint. By your logic, putting the ravings of a serial killer away in the police evidence room is "removing history".

And the USA thought it was a crime to help fugitive slaves. When it comes to right and wrong, they're a bit slow on the uptake.